non-lucid

Disclaimer: This dream journal is about sleep paralysis/demon encounters. I want to clarify that sleep paralysis and intense nightmares like mine aren't normal, nothing about this is normal. I don't recommend that anyone attempt to do this. I've been dealing with SP and demon encounters for over 20 years. It's not something to take lightly or recommend, this is just my own very personal dream life that I'm sharing.

I also want to point out that there's a lot of misinformation in the LD community about LDs causing sleep paralysis, despite how useful LDs are at combatting SP. lucid dreaming didn't cause my SP. Rather, lucidity is the way I've learned how to get out of SP/nightmares and this dream shows how.

Anywho.

As I fell asleep consciously, I felt a demon's claws sinking into my back. Its nails brought an uncanny electrical sensation through my spine, as if a poison was being injected into my spinal cord directly, shooting straight through my nervous system to the rest of my body. This caused waves of pain with occassionally intense spikes, growing more and more intense by the moment. It was dreadful.

The demon was standing behind me (I normally sleep on my side). I don't know if I was paralyzed because I didn't try to move. My goal was to combat this mentally through calm meditation, not physical struggling.

I already know how to break SP with physical movement, and that's not what I wanted to do here. This was a planned encounter. I invited a demon to induce SP.

"This is fine. Keep going." I thought in my mind, wanting the demon to continue as I practiced my mental fortitude to combat the feeling, mentally wrestling with it and pushing it out of my mind. It was overwhelming, but I kept going.

The demon cranked the pain up a tenfold. I started getting severe spikes of pain going through my nervous system every few seconds, increasing in frequency. I stayed calm and still didn't react despite the pain.

I've been inviting this demon to come visit me in my sleep for a few weeks now. Why? Because I'm stagnating, I've exhausted my the resources of my personal dreamwork and I can't figure out how to push myself any other way... I need to grow, I have to keep going. My life is a mess right now and I'm desperate to become stronger so I can deal with it.

The demon stopped after a while, since it wasn't breaking me. I felt its energy fade, and I too was fading into a dreamed version of my bedroom. The color of the walls, lighting, and layout of the house slowly changed in the emergence of the dreamscape. I was still technically my house, just an altered version of it.

I felt an uneasy presence in the room and knew the demon was still standing somewhere nearbby watching me, invisible and waiting.

I decided to walk out into the livingroom. This part I'm not going to share because it's too personal, but one of my insecurities manifested in the next dream scene of loved ones yelling at me, and it quickly snowballed. My calm demeanor slipped as I felt my mind spiral out of control from the insecurities. I was upset. In that moment of clouded thinking, I actually lost my lucidity.

This was not normal. It's rare for me to lose lucidity when I'm upset. This went on for a few minutes before I regained my lucidity. Being upset normally triggers lucidity for me, so I got it back pretty quickly.

I felt the demon laughing at me, though, and realized it did that on purpose. Impressive, I thought, but I was still freaked out. I realized that this demon had found one of my weakness. It couldn't get me with sleep paralysis and pain, so it had (successfully) targeted a psychological weakness instead.

Challenge accepted.

I quickly walked into another room, intending to change the dream scene to get myself out of that negative emotional state. If I could calm down, I could regain control and prevent the demon from weakening me any further.
This was kind of thrilling, I have to admit. I like playing these mental games, and learning from my mistakes.

I suddenly woke up for seemingly no reason, which is unusual for me. I typically always have a reason for waking up, whether because of an alarm, the natural end of a dream, a nightmare, or my own intention to awake... I don't just 'randomly' wake up from my dreams.

So I sat up in bed, unaware that this was a false awakening, which is AGAIN unusual for me. I haven't fallen for an FA in a while, yet this time, I really thought I was awake.

Now nonlucid dreaming, I walked back out into the livingroom and ANOTHER one of my insecurities manifested. Some of my personal embarrassing text messages were revealed to people I didn't want to share them with! Thinking it was really happening, I was mortified. But then I became lucid again (since negative emotions normally trigger lucidity for me) and was incredibly relieved that this embarrassing moment wasn't actually happening.

The demon was laughing at me pretty hard though. I knew it had tricked me into having an FA and being nonlucid.
I suddenly woke up again. The demon was trying it's trick a second time.
"No. Not this time~" I told myself, laughing maniacally.
Fooled me once, shame on me...

I was kind of unsure though, so I did a reality check and it failed. My hands were solid.
Whatever. I don't trust reality checks anyway, so I wasn't nonlucid just yet.
I tried to use dream control next, going to fly upwards towards the wall. Normally my dream control works, but this failed too.

"Huh... " I thought, starting to believe I might actually be awake...
Reality checks and dream control can fail, though, I thought, so I still wasn't fully sold on this being waking reality. I was really thinking hard on this one.
Could still be a dream.
I was determined to not be tricked again and I was pretty sure that my uncertainty meant this was for sure a dream.
What a puzzle.
I normally ALWAYS know when I'm dreaming, so this was... really weird.
The weirdness of it alone made me even more suspicious.

I proceeded to have several more false awakenings, over and over again. Sometimes I knew it was a dream, and other times I wasn't sure, but I felt like the demon was flipping a light switch back and fourth repeatedly trying to break my lucidity.

"Mother-" I cursed and laughed.

Normally I'd be fine continuing this game, it was fun, but I knew I had to get up early in the morning and didn't want my sleep quality to be obliterated tonight (lucidity doesn't affect my sleep quality, but nightmares like this can when they go on for too long).

So I decided I was going to end this by waking myself up.

First, I found an alter for the demon in the dreamscape (which had offerings on it). "Thank you, that was impressive. No hard feelings~" I said to the demon as I destroyed the alter, shoving the whole thing off the table and breaking the artifacts.

Then I woke myself up (for real). I checked the physical reality clock and realized... That whole thing only lasted an hour?!

It felt like 4+ hours had gone by, so I was shocked. This is also unusual of for me, since I've specifically trained myself to not experience time dilation (I don't like when my time perception in dreams doesn't match waking reality).

I reached for the protective pendant I keep on my desk (which keeps demons away, but I had intentionally taken it off before bed as an invitation). It was shoved under my photography lightbox for some reason, kind of wedged under there (not where I put it, but ok). I was going to put it on when I realized the chain was torn off.

This was in waking reality. I searched high and low for the necklace chain. I found the chain on the floor and put my pendant on, did some other protection stuff in the room, and went back to sleep.
Had normal dreams for the rest of the night.

Final note: this dream happened the night before last.

I was trying to break a kid free from a school that was imprisoning him. It was a long process of avoiding the campus police, as this was the largest campus I had ever seen, and I kept getting lost.

I eventually got him out of there, and he climbed one of the tall fences out onto the city road.

As I crossed the street, I turned into my dragon and spent time in the city.

I eventually went into a beautiful, massive building. I’m not well-versed in building architecture, so I’m not sure what type of building it was exactly. A cathedral? A monestary? The floors were a glossy white, surrounded by pillars decorated with blues, reds, and golds. There were multiple levels you could climb up, each hall winding along the walls.

I went through the front door for once! I had a respect for this building that I don’t normally feel.

I wandered up each floor all the way to the top, then back down.

I spent this time being mindful of my perceptions and body, feeling the numb, warm, comfortable tingling sensation of sleep. I’ve been thinking of using this to recognize dreams, since it’s a physical feeling that’s always present in sleep.

I took a moment to check in with my senses and perception, thinking about how surprising it is that so many people don’t expect dreams to feel real.

Everything feels completely real and vivid, identical to waking experience (aside from that sense of the body laying comfortably numb in bed).

I wouldn’t be able to tell it was a dream just based on my eyesight, touch, or other senses.

I exited the dream for a moment and sat in pure aware sleep. Then I re-entered the dream again, reappearing in the same spot.

I had atajen pictures on my phone and was amazed at how my mind could create these pictures, yet I can’t draw anything nearly that realistic.

A monk walked by, wearing orange robes. I asked him if he knew what lucid dreamers were.

He answered “Yes, I’m talking to one.” with a smile.

“Oh, excellent. Do you have any recommendations for me?” I asked, happy that he knew me. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, or what I should do.

He then turned and pointed towards the stairs. “Yes. If you walk up, you can get to the top. It’s a couple of stories, but there’s a nice spiraling staircase at the top that’s worth the journey.”

I nodded. “Thank you. I was just there. It was lovely.” I said.

I could feel myself about to wake up. It’s morning and my body is ready to get out of bed. I stayed in the dream a bit longer.
“I have a few minutes at most.” I said.

“Ah.” he replied, understanding what I meant.

He was going to show me something else, but as I was walking with him, I woke up.

This dream was not the most interesting. Normally I don’t bother writing these down, but wanted to touch up on my recall.

—-

Post apocalypse, me and a group of people drove away from our home town to escape an apocalypse.

Most of us didn’t know each other because we had just narrowly escaped disaster by squeezing into this vehicle last second.

There were three men, a newborn infant (belonged to one of the men), and a woman who was driving.

As we drove, we spotted a store that still had its lights on (not sure how because nowhere else had power) and wasn’t reduced to a pile of rubble like the buildings around it.

So we pulled over. It was a Disney giftshop of all things.

Turns out that despite everyone dying in the apocalypse and buildings going up in flames, Disney kept up with regular business hours.

The employees all acted like there was nothing going on outside.

They still took cash, even though money was pretty much useless now because of the apocalypse.

So we went in to purchase some supplies for the baby, which felt like a surreal contrast with how the world was outside.

Then we got back into the car and drove off, eventually reaching a city that appeared to be abandoned.

In this city, the buildings were all eerily covered in black and white striped fumigation tents.

We got out if the car because several of the guys wanted to stay here for the night, so we all stepped out and talked about our plans, speculating about why everything was tented.

An disagreement ensued because the woman wanted to leave, but her decision was outnumbered because everyone else wanted to stay.

The problem with splitting up the group was who got to take the car (the city had no cars in it, or they were under the tents).

Eventually the disagreement turned into politics (go figure) and got heated. I ended it by going with the woman and leaving everyone else with the car (turns out she just didn’t want to go alone, so she agreed to this setup).

So we set out on foot into the wilderness. The woman walked ahead of me and suddenly transformed into a wolfdog.

I was surprised because I didn’t expect her to have this ability, which I also have (guess we had more in common than I realized). So I turned into a wolf and ran after her through the forest. This made it easier to follow her because of my heightened sense of smell.

That’s all I remember for this one.

I was at a convention, about to make a sale, and was in a bit of a hurry. I was nonlucid.

Suddenly out of nowhere, my grandpa walked by, as though just passing through. It didn’t fit with the scene and was a noticeable interruption from my current state of mind, but not because he was trying to be noticed. I got the feeling he wouldn’t have even looked at me, had I not initiated eye contact.

He smiled with genuine happiness, the way he used to smile at me. It was real, I thought. Something I hadn’t seen in a very long time, and never thought would happen again. I was instantly lucid.

There was something peaceful about him. He was ready to just walk by without interrupting the show, but I greeted him and we walked away from the convention into what appeared to be a Denny’s booth (with dark gray carpet on the floor, the wooden table and bench, and the red fake leather seatbacks).

“How are you doing?!” I asked, addressing him by his first name.

“Doing good! Its so nice to see you!” he said with a jovial lift in his voice like he used to have. I’ll never forget the joy he had.

“I’m glad to hear it.” I answered. “How is the real one doing?” I asked, referring to his physical self.

He frowned and seemed more dubious on the subject. “I just wish I could wake up…” he said with a sort of frustration and disappointment that was dwarfed by his happiness to be here. It seemed like he had been dealing with something lately.

That was about it for this one. I purposely woke up to write it down.